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The Wax and the Wane of the Web
I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on.
The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake our world.
How we got here
I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.
The birth of web standards
At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.
Server-side languages like PHP, Java, and .NET overtook Perl as the predominant back-end processors, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the trash bin. With these better server-side tools came the first era of web applications, starting with content-management systems (particularly in the blogging space with tools like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress). In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Suddenly, pages could update their content without needing to reload. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement let crafty designers and developers display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.
These new technologies, standards, and techniques reinvigorated the industry in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. But we still relied on tons of hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes (such as rounded or angled corners) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks). Complicated layouts required all manner of nested floats or absolute positioning (or both). Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it easy for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, although at the cost of doubling or even quadrupling the download size of simple websites.
The web as software platform
The symbiosis between the front end and back end continued to improve, and that led to the current era of modern web applications. Between expanded server-side programming languages (which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Alongside these tools came others, including collaborative version control, build automation, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.
At the same time, mobile devices became more capable, and they gave us internet access in our pockets. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.
This combination of capable mobile devices and powerful development tools contributed to the waxing of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and consume. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media offered connections on a global scale, with both the good and bad that that entails.
Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? Jeremy Keith wrote “Of Time and the Web.” Or check out the “Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. Neal Agarwal also has a fun tour through “Internet Artifacts.”
Where we are now
In the last couple of years, it’s felt like we’ve begun to reach another major inflection point. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to make a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all flavors. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other tools of the IndieWeb can help with this, but they’re still relatively underimplemented and hard to use for the less nerdy. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.
Browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has accelerated, especially through efforts like Interop. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. I often learn about a new feature and check its browser support only to find that its coverage is already above 80 percent. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.
Today, with a few commands and a couple of lines of code, we can prototype almost any idea. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. But the upfront cost that these frameworks may save in initial delivery eventually comes due as upgrading and maintaining them becomes a part of our technical debt.
If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks—which used to let us adopt new techniques sooner—have now become hindrances instead. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail (whether through poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors), there’s often no alternative, leaving users with blank or broken pages.
Where do we go from here?
Today’s hacks help to shape tomorrow’s standards. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks—for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we’re unwilling to admit that they’re hacks or we hesitate to replace them. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?
Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. Weigh the costs of those developer-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What’s the cost to users? To future developers? To standards adoption? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. Sometimes it’s just a hack that you’ve grown accustomed to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.
Start from standards. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. The same isn’t always true of third-party frameworks. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the ’90s still work just fine today. The same can’t always be said of sites built with frameworks even after just a couple years.
Design with care. Whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes, consider the impacts of each decision. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Rather than rushing headlong to “move fast and break things,” use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with deliberation.
Always be learning. If you’re always learning, you’re also growing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. You might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year, even if you were to focus solely on learning standards. (Remember XHTML?) But constant learning opens up new connections in your brain, and the hacks that you learn one day may help to inform different experiments another day.
Play, experiment, and be weird! This web that we’ve built is the ultimate experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be courageous and try new things. Build a playground for ideas. Make goofy experiments in your own mad science lab. Start your own small business. There has never been a more empowering place to be creative, take risks, and explore what we’re capable of.
Share and amplify. As you experiment, play, and learn, share what’s worked for you. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.
Go forth and make
As designers and developers for the web (and beyond), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s imbue our values into the things that we create, and let’s make the web a better place for everyone. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then share it, make it better, make it again, or make something new. Learn. Make. Share. Grow. Rinse and repeat. Every time you think that you’ve mastered the web, everything will change.
To Ignite a Personalization Practice, Run this Prepersonalization Workshop
Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed.
Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan.
For those of you venturing into personalization, there’s no Lonely Planet and few tour guides because effective personalization is so specific to each organization’s talent, technology, and market position.
But you can ensure that your team has packed its bags sensibly.
There’s a DIY formula to increase your chances for success. At minimum, you’ll defuse your boss’s irrational exuberance. Before the party you’ll need to effectively prepare.
We call it prepersonalization.
Behind the music
Consider Spotify’s DJ feature, which debuted this past year.
We’re used to seeing the polished final result of a personalization feature. Before the year-end award, the making-of backstory, or the behind-the-scenes victory lap, a personalized feature had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized. Before any personalization feature goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a backlog of worthy ideas for expressing customer experiences more dynamically.
So how do you know where to place your personalization bets? How do you design consistent interactions that won’t trip up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many budgeted programs to justify their ongoing investments, they first needed one or more workshops to convene key stakeholders and internal customers of the technology. Make yours count.
From Big Tech to fledgling startups, we’ve seen the same evolution up close with our clients. In our experiences with working on small and large personalization efforts, a program’s ultimate track record—and its ability to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and organize its design and technology efforts—turns on how effectively these prepersonalization activities play out.
Time and again, we’ve seen effective workshops separate future success stories from unsuccessful efforts, saving countless time, resources, and collective well-being in the process.
A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip moment in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps:
- customer experience optimization (CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation)
- always-on automations (whether rules-based or machine-generated)
- mature features or standalone product development (such as Spotify’s DJ experience)
This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t need these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.
Set your kitchen timer
How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The surrounding assessment activities that we recommend including can (and often do) span weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here’s a summary of our broader approach along with details on the essential first-day activities.
The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:
- Kickstart: This sets the terms of engagement as you focus on the opportunity as well as the readiness and drive of your team and your leadership. .
- Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
- Work your plan: This phase is all about creating a competitive environment for team participants to individually pitch their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.
Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.
Kickstart: Whet your appetite
We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience.” It explores the personalization possibilities in your organization. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. This could be a content-management system combined with a marketing-automation platform. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.
Spark conversation by naming consumer examples and business-to-business examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions (such as onboarding sequences or wizards), notifications, and recommenders. We have a catalog of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.
This is all about setting the table. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? If you want a broader view, here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework.
Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature (or something similar). In our cards, we divide connected experiences into five levels: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to focus the conversation on the merits of ongoing investment as well as the gap between what you deliver today and what you want to deliver in the future.
Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is critical because it emphasizes how personalization can not only help your external customers but also affect your own ways of working. It’s also a reminder (which is why we used the word argument earlier) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.
Each team member should vote on where they see your product or service putting its emphasis. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. The intention here is to flesh out how different departments may view their own upsides to the effort, which can vary from one to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.
The third and final kickstart activity is about naming your personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy compliance be too big of a challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? (We’re pretty sure that you do: it’s just a matter of recognizing the relative size of that need and its remedy.) In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. Our Detractor card, for example, lists six stakeholder behaviors that hinder progress.
Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential barriers to your future progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As studies have shown, personalization efforts face many common barriers.
At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good—you’re ready to continue.
Hit that test kitchen
Next, let’s look at what you’ll need to bring your personalization recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are sweeping and powerful, and they present broad options for how your organization can conduct its activities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?
What’s important here is to avoid treating the installed software like it were a dream kitchen from some fantasy remodeling project (as one of our client executives memorably put it). These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.
The ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together over the course of the workshop. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.
The dishes will come from recipes, and those recipes have set ingredients.
Verify your ingredients
Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure—andyou’ll validate with the right stakeholders present—that you have all the ingredients on hand to cook up your desired interaction (or that you can work out what needs to be added to your pantry). These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.
This isn’t just about discovering requirements. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:
- compare findings toward a unified approach for developing features, not unlike when artists paint with the same palette;
- specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar;
- and develop parity across performance measurements and key performance indicators too.
This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.
Compose your recipe
What ingredients are important to you? Think of a who-what-when-why construct:
- Who are your key audience segments or groups?
- What kind of content will you give them, in what design elements, and under what circumstances?
- And for which business and user benefits?
We first developed these cards and card categories five years ago. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still encounter new possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.
Here are three examples for a subscription-based reading app, which you can generally follow along with right to left in the cards in the accompanying photo below.
- Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
- Welcome automation: When there’s a newly registered user, an email is generated to call out the breadth of the content catalog and to make them a happier subscriber.
- Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.
A useful preworkshop activity may be to think through a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, although we’ve also found that this process sometimes flows best through cocreating the recipes themselves. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.
You can think of the later stages of the workshop as moving from recipes toward a cookbook in focus—like a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual “cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.
Better kitchens require better architecture
Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware anyone who says otherwise. With that being said, “Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes.”
When personalization becomes a laugh line, it’s because a team is overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. Your AI’s output quality, for example, is indeed limited by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.
You can definitely stand the heat…
Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will bring about the necessary focus and intention to succeed. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, hit the test kitchen to save time, preserve job satisfaction and security, and safely dispense with the fanciful ideas that originate upstairs of the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.
This workshop framework gives you a fighting shot at lasting success as well as sound beginnings. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. But if you use the same cookbook and shared recipes, you’ll have solid footing for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.
While there are associated costs toward investing in this kind of technology and product design, your ability to size up and confront your unique situation and your digital capabilities is time well spent. Don’t squander it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
User Research Is Storytelling
Ever since I was a boy, I’ve been fascinated with movies. I loved the characters and the excitement—but most of all the stories. I wanted to be an actor. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting adventures. I even dreamed up ideas for movies that my friends and I could make and star in. But they never went any further. I did, however, end up working in user experience (UX). Now, I realize that there’s an element of theater to UX—I hadn’t really considered it before, but user research is storytelling. And to get the most out of user research, you need to tell a good story where you bring stakeholders—the product team and decision makers—along and get them interested in learning more.
Think of your favorite movie. More than likely it follows a three-act structure that’s commonly seen in storytelling: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution. The first act shows what exists today, and it helps you get to know the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two introduces the conflict, where the action is. Here, problems grow or get worse. And the third and final act is the resolution. This is where the issues are resolved and the characters learn and change. I believe that this structure is also a great way to think about user research, and I think that it can be especially helpful in explaining user research to others.
Use storytelling as a structure to do research
It’s sad to say, but many have come to see research as being expendable. If budgets or timelines are tight, research tends to be one of the first things to go. Instead of investing in research, some product managers rely on designers or—worse—their own opinion to make the “right” choices for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get teams some of the way, but that approach can so easily miss out on solving users’ real problems. To remain user-centered, this is something we should avoid. User research elevates design. It keeps it on track, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the issues with your product and reacting to them can help you stay ahead of your competitors.
In the three-act structure, each act corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is critical to telling the whole story. Let’s look at the different acts and how they align with user research.
Act one: setup
The setup is all about understanding the background, and that’s where foundational research comes in. Foundational research (also called generative, discovery, or initial research) helps you understand users and identify their problems. You’re learning about what exists today, the challenges users have, and how the challenges affect them—just like in the movies. To do foundational research, you can conduct contextual inquiries or diary studies (or both!), which can help you start to identify problems as well as opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a huge investment in time or money.
Erika Hall writes about minimum viable ethnography, which can be as simple as spending 15 minutes with a user and asking them one thing: “‘Walk me through your day yesterday.’ That’s it. Present that one request. Shut up and listen to them for 15 minutes. Do your damndest to keep yourself and your interests out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography.” According to Hall, “[This] will probably prove quite illuminating. In the highly unlikely case that you didn’t learn anything new or useful, carry on with enhanced confidence in your direction.”
This makes total sense to me. And I love that this makes user research so accessible. You don’t need to prepare a lot of documentation; you can just recruit participants and do it! This can yield a wealth of information about your users, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their lives. That’s really what act one is all about: understanding where users are coming from.
Jared Spool talks about the importance of foundational research and how it should form the bulk of your research. If you can draw from any additional user data that you can get your hands on, such as surveys or analytics, that can supplement what you’ve heard in the foundational studies or even point to areas that need further investigation. Together, all this data paints a clearer picture of the state of things and all its shortcomings. And that’s the beginning of a compelling story. It’s the point in the plot where you realize that the main characters—or the users in this case—are facing challenges that they need to overcome. Like in the movies, this is where you start to build empathy for the characters and root for them to succeed. And hopefully stakeholders are now doing the same. Their sympathy may be with their business, which could be losing money because users can’t complete certain tasks. Or maybe they do empathize with users’ struggles. Either way, act one is your initial hook to get the stakeholders interested and invested.
Once stakeholders begin to understand the value of foundational research, that can open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making process. And that can guide product teams toward being more user-centered. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s like winning an Oscar in movie terms—it often leads to your product being well received and successful. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Storytelling is the key to this process, and knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to get stakeholders to really care about doing more research.
This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.
Act two: conflict
Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This usually involves directional research, such as usability tests, where you assess a potential solution (such as a design) to see whether it addresses the issues that you found. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. Like act two in a movie, more issues will crop up along the way. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.
Usability tests should typically include around five participants according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify most of the problems: “As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.”
There are parallels with storytelling here too; if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. Having fewer participants means that each user’s struggles will be more memorable and easier to relay to other stakeholders when talking about the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.
Researchers have run usability tests in person for decades, but you can also conduct usability tests remotely using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You can think of in-person usability tests like going to a play and remote sessions as more like watching a movie. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. In-person usability research is a much richer experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time reactions—including surprise, agreement, disagreement, and discussions about what they’re seeing. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors’ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.
If in-person usability testing is like watching a play—staged and controlled—then conducting usability testing in the field is like immersive theater where any two sessions might be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can go out to meet users at their location to do your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. As researchers, you have less control over how these sessions go, but this can sometimes help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests provide another level of detail that’s often missing from remote usability tests.
That’s not to say that the “movies”—remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. And they open the doors to a much wider geographical pool of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.
The benefit of usability testing, whether remote or in person, is that you get to see real users interact with the designs in real time, and you can ask them questions to understand their thought processes and grasp of the solution. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Furthermore, you can test hypotheses and gauge whether your thinking is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is the heart of the story—where the excitement is—but there can be surprises too. This is equally true of usability tests. Often, participants will say unexpected things, which change the way that you look at things—and these twists in the story can move things in new directions.
Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. And too often usability testing is the only research process that some stakeholders think that they ever need. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users (foundational research), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. That’s because you’re narrowing the focus of what you’re getting feedback on, without understanding the users’ needs. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. It’s only feedback on a particular design in the context of a usability test.
On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This illustrates the importance of doing both foundational and directional research.
In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can help motivate stakeholders to address the issues that come up.
Act three: resolution
While the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can propel stakeholders into action, the third part is about resolving the problems from the first two acts. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That means the whole product team, including developers, UX practitioners, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other stakeholders that have a say in the next steps. It allows the whole team to hear users’ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. And it lets the UX research and design teams clarify, suggest alternatives, or give more context behind their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.
This act is mostly told in voiceover with some audience participation. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They give the stakeholders their recommendations and their guidance on creating this vision.
Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. “The most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved,” writes Duarte. “That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently.”
This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides evidence for “what is”—the problems that you’ve identified. And “what could be”—your recommendations on how to address them. And so on and so forth.
You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be visual, like quick mockups of how a new design could look that solves a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the end of the session when you’ve wrapped everything up in the conclusion by summarizing the main issues and suggesting a way forward. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage gives stakeholders the next steps and hopefully the momentum to take those steps!
While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research:
- Act one: You meet the protagonists (the users) and the antagonists (the problems affecting users). This is the beginning of the plot. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. The output of these methods can include personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.
- Act two: Next, there’s character development. There’s conflict and tension as the protagonists encounter problems and challenges, which they must overcome. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. The output of these can include usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices.
- Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. In act three, researchers may use methods including presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.
The researcher has multiple roles: they’re the storyteller, the director, and the producer. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters (in the research). And the stakeholders are the audience. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users’ stories through research. By the end, the stakeholders should walk away with a purpose and an eagerness to resolve the product’s ills.
So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. Ultimately, user research is a win-win for everyone, and you just need to get stakeholders interested in how the story ends.
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When you first hear “circuit training,” it may sound somewhat complicated. However, it’s actually a very straightforward way to improve your endurance and strength.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session (all while keeping your boredom at bay).
Here’s everything you need to know about circuit training, plus a sample workout to try.
What is circuit training?
Circuit training is a sequence of exercises performed with minimum rest between each one.
“Each exercise targets different muscle groups, providing a comprehensive workout that combines both strength training and cardiovascular conditioning,” says Laurie Nielsen-Consiglieri, CPT, a certified personal trainer and district fitness manager at 24 Hour Fitness.
In other words, circuit training is really about how you structure your workouts, rather than any one particular type of exercise. In circuit training, you’ll do each move for a certain number of reps or amount of time, then quickly move on to the next exercise.
“Because it’s so fast-paced, you can usually get a great workout done in about 30 to 45 minutes,” says Josh York, CPT, a certified personal trainer and founder and CEO of GYMGUYZ, a personal training company.
Circuit training benefits
That time efficiency is one reason many people love circuit workouts, which can still help you get the combined benefits of both strength training and aerobic exercise in less time.
“You can get a solid workout in a fraction of the time it would take you to perform a complete weight-lifting routine or cardio workout separately,” says Jake Dickson, CPT, a certified personal trainer at Barbend.
Circuit training can easily be customized to fit various fitness levels and goals—and can be done with or without equipment.
This type of workout also has several health benefits, says Nielsen-Consiglieri, such as:
- Improving cardiovascular health
- Increasing strength and muscle tone
- Enhancing metabolism
- Boosting endurance and stamina
- Providing a full-body workout
In fact, those who did circuit-based training saw more improvements in strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, and body composition (decreased fat mass) compared to control groups in a 2021 review in the journal Biology.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session.
Circuit training drawbacks
Because circuit training involves high-intensity movements with minimal rest, it can sometimes lead to muscle strains or sprains. It’s important to listen to your body throughout the workout.
“The biggest drawback of circuit training is that it may not allow for sufficient recovery time between exercises,” says Stacy Orsborn, CPT, a certified personal trainer and co-founder and president of fitness at VICTRESS MVMT, a fitness training facility in Lincoln, Nebraska.
As a result, circuit training may lead to fatigue, which can compromise form and increase the risk of injury—particularly for beginners, women in certain stages of life like perimenopause or postmenopause, or those with already high levels of stress in their daily lives, Orsborn says.
Circuit training is also not a quick fix for many specific fitness goals.
“While it’s great for general fitness, it might not be the best choice if you have specific goals, such as achieving a certain level of strength or training for a marathon,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Finally, circuit training can eventually result in you plateauing if you don’t introduce enough variety into your workouts.
“Doing the same circuit repeatedly can lead to your body adapting, which might slow your progress,” York says. “To keep seeing improvements, try mixing up your routine and adding new challenges.” (In case you’re wondering, here’s how often to switch up your workout routine.)
Does circuit training count as cardio?
Yes, because you’re moving quickly from one exercise to another with minimal rest.
“This can elevate your heart rate and provide cardio benefits,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Also known as aerobic or endurance exercise, you can think of cardio as anything that boosts your heart rate or gets you breathing a little harder, per Harvard Medical School.
Although exercises like running, swimming, dancing, or hiking are traditionally thought of as cardio staples, circuit training also counts, since the sustained high effort elevates your heart rate throughout the workout, Dickson adds.
Does circuit training count as strength training?
It can, but it depends on what type of resistance exercises it incorporates.
“When a circuit incorporates resistance exercises like push-ups, squats, lunges, or weightlifting movements, it can build strength and muscle tone,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
The effectiveness of circuit training for strengthening will depend on the specific exercises, resistance levels, and structure of the workout.
“While it can be less physically demanding than other resistance training, circuit training can still assist in building stronger muscles,” York says. “The circuit can be designed to target your upper body, lower body, and core, for instance.”
Is circuit training the same as HIIT?
Not quite: While both involve interval training with rest, there are key differences.
“One of the biggest differences is that circuit training can be performed at various intensities, whereas HIIT [high-intensity interval training] requires your full effort, with the goal of hitting 80 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate,” York says.
Circuit training rotates through a series of moderate-intensity exercises that target different muscle groups with almost no rest between each one. HIIT, on the other hand, can involve a single exercise or multiple ones that are performed at maximum intensity for short intervals, followed by rest.
The structure of intervals is another difference, York adds. Circuit training can be based on either time or repetition intervals (say, completing an exercise for 30 seconds or completing an exercise 10 times). HIIT, on the other hand, tends to focus more exclusively on time intervals.
A sample circuit workout to add to your routine
For a quick circuit training workout at home, try this routine designed by Orsborn.
Perform each exercise for 45 seconds, followed by 15 seconds of rest before moving to the next exercise (that counts as one round). Complete four rounds total, resting for one to two minutes between rounds.
1. Dumbbell squat
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Bend your knees as you push your hips back to lower toward the floor, pretending you were going to sit on a chair.
- Lower down as far as comfortable, or until your thighs are parallel with the floor.
- Make sure your knees track over your toes throughout the movement.
- Drive through your heels to return to standing.
- Repeat.
2. Push-up
- Begin in a high plank position with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Your body should form a straight line from your head to your heels.
- Bend your elbows at a 45-degree angle to your body and lower your chest to the floor (or as close as possible), keeping your body in a straight line.
- Push through your hands back up to the starting position. Keep your core tight and exhale on your way up.
- Repeat.
3. Renegade row
- Place two dumbbells slightly closer than shoulder-width apart on the ground.
- Grip each dumbbell and come into a high plank, shoulders stacked over hands, feet slightly wider than hip-width apart and your body in a straight line from head to heels.
- Lift your left hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your left hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Lift your right hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your right hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Continue alternating for all reps.
4. Dumbbell lunge
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at your sides (palms facing in), your feet hip-width apart.
- Step your left foot forward, then bend both knees and lower them toward the floor with control.
- Keep lowering until your back knee is about an inch off the ground (or as low as comfortable).
- Push through your front heel to return to standing.
- Repeat on opposite leg.
5. Dumbbell push press
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Dip your lower-body slightly by bending your knees, then explosively press the dumbbells overhead (using your legs to help drive the weight up).
- Exhale as you drive overhead and straighten your knees.
- Return the dumbbells to your shoulders.
- Repeat.
6. Glute bridge
- Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor, arms down by your sides.
- Lift your hips by squeezing your glutes, creating a straight line from shoulders to knees.
- Lower back down with control.
- Repeat.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout.” —Josh York, CPT
Who circuit training is best for
Circuit training can be a good fit for a variety of people, especially since it can be tailored to your unique goals. According to Nielsen-Consiglieri, this can include:
- Beginners
- Busy, time-strapped individuals
- Those who want to improve general fitness
- People with limited equipment or space
- Athletes or fitness enthusiasts
It’s also a great option if you tend to get bored easily.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout,” York says.
Safety tips
Before you dive into a circuit training workout, make sure you warm up properly to increase your body temperature, boost your blood flow, and loosen your muscles. York recommends five to 10 minutes of dynamic warmups, such as jumping jacks, light jogging, or arm circles.
Next, get your equipment and space in order. Circuit training is already intense, so there’s no need to push beyond your limits when it comes to the weights you’re using (if your workout includes equipment).
Also make sure you have enough room to do the various exercises in your circuit. “You don’t want to feel cramped in the middle of your session, or risk injury by bumping into another gym-goer,” Dickson says.
Because of the intensity and lack of breaks with circuit training, it’s key to watch your form (focus on this over weight or reps) and slow down as needed. Don’t be hard on yourself if you end up needing to take a longer break during your circuit training. Also look out for signs that you may have pushed yourself too far.
“This can be an intense workout—and feeling dizzy, nauseous or weak can be a sign of overdoing it,” York says. “If you feel any of these, you should immediately stop the workout.”
Finally, while it’s important to stay hydrated during any workout, circuit training can get especially sweaty (and, as a result, dehydrating). Drink water before rounds to restore your fluid levels.
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When you first hear “circuit training,” it may sound somewhat complicated. However, it’s actually a very straightforward way to improve your endurance and strength.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session (all while keeping your boredom at bay).
Here’s everything you need to know about circuit training, plus a sample workout to try.
What is circuit training?
Circuit training is a sequence of exercises performed with minimum rest between each one.
“Each exercise targets different muscle groups, providing a comprehensive workout that combines both strength training and cardiovascular conditioning,” says Laurie Nielsen-Consiglieri, CPT, a certified personal trainer and district fitness manager at 24 Hour Fitness.
In other words, circuit training is really about how you structure your workouts, rather than any one particular type of exercise. In circuit training, you’ll do each move for a certain number of reps or amount of time, then quickly move on to the next exercise.
“Because it’s so fast-paced, you can usually get a great workout done in about 30 to 45 minutes,” says Josh York, CPT, a certified personal trainer and founder and CEO of GYMGUYZ, a personal training company.
Circuit training benefits
That time efficiency is one reason many people love circuit workouts, which can still help you get the combined benefits of both strength training and aerobic exercise in less time.
“You can get a solid workout in a fraction of the time it would take you to perform a complete weight-lifting routine or cardio workout separately,” says Jake Dickson, CPT, a certified personal trainer at Barbend.
Circuit training can easily be customized to fit various fitness levels and goals—and can be done with or without equipment.
This type of workout also has several health benefits, says Nielsen-Consiglieri, such as:
- Improving cardiovascular health
- Increasing strength and muscle tone
- Enhancing metabolism
- Boosting endurance and stamina
- Providing a full-body workout
In fact, those who did circuit-based training saw more improvements in strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, and body composition (decreased fat mass) compared to control groups in a 2021 review in the journal Biology.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session.
Circuit training drawbacks
Because circuit training involves high-intensity movements with minimal rest, it can sometimes lead to muscle strains or sprains. It’s important to listen to your body throughout the workout.
“The biggest drawback of circuit training is that it may not allow for sufficient recovery time between exercises,” says Stacy Orsborn, CPT, a certified personal trainer and co-founder and president of fitness at VICTRESS MVMT, a fitness training facility in Lincoln, Nebraska.
As a result, circuit training may lead to fatigue, which can compromise form and increase the risk of injury—particularly for beginners, women in certain stages of life like perimenopause or postmenopause, or those with already high levels of stress in their daily lives, Orsborn says.
Circuit training is also not a quick fix for many specific fitness goals.
“While it’s great for general fitness, it might not be the best choice if you have specific goals, such as achieving a certain level of strength or training for a marathon,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Finally, circuit training can eventually result in you plateauing if you don’t introduce enough variety into your workouts.
“Doing the same circuit repeatedly can lead to your body adapting, which might slow your progress,” York says. “To keep seeing improvements, try mixing up your routine and adding new challenges.” (In case you’re wondering, here’s how often to switch up your workout routine.)
Does circuit training count as cardio?
Yes, because you’re moving quickly from one exercise to another with minimal rest.
“This can elevate your heart rate and provide cardio benefits,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Also known as aerobic or endurance exercise, you can think of cardio as anything that boosts your heart rate or gets you breathing a little harder, per Harvard Medical School.
Although exercises like running, swimming, dancing, or hiking are traditionally thought of as cardio staples, circuit training also counts, since the sustained high effort elevates your heart rate throughout the workout, Dickson adds.
Does circuit training count as strength training?
It can, but it depends on what type of resistance exercises it incorporates.
“When a circuit incorporates resistance exercises like push-ups, squats, lunges, or weightlifting movements, it can build strength and muscle tone,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
The effectiveness of circuit training for strengthening will depend on the specific exercises, resistance levels, and structure of the workout.
“While it can be less physically demanding than other resistance training, circuit training can still assist in building stronger muscles,” York says. “The circuit can be designed to target your upper body, lower body, and core, for instance.”
Is circuit training the same as HIIT?
Not quite: While both involve interval training with rest, there are key differences.
“One of the biggest differences is that circuit training can be performed at various intensities, whereas HIIT [high-intensity interval training] requires your full effort, with the goal of hitting 80 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate,” York says.
Circuit training rotates through a series of moderate-intensity exercises that target different muscle groups with almost no rest between each one. HIIT, on the other hand, can involve a single exercise or multiple ones that are performed at maximum intensity for short intervals, followed by rest.
The structure of intervals is another difference, York adds. Circuit training can be based on either time or repetition intervals (say, completing an exercise for 30 seconds or completing an exercise 10 times). HIIT, on the other hand, tends to focus more exclusively on time intervals.
A sample circuit workout to add to your routine
For a quick circuit training workout at home, try this routine designed by Orsborn.
Perform each exercise for 45 seconds, followed by 15 seconds of rest before moving to the next exercise (that counts as one round). Complete four rounds total, resting for one to two minutes between rounds.
1. Dumbbell squat
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Bend your knees as you push your hips back to lower toward the floor, pretending you were going to sit on a chair.
- Lower down as far as comfortable, or until your thighs are parallel with the floor.
- Make sure your knees track over your toes throughout the movement.
- Drive through your heels to return to standing.
- Repeat.
2. Push-up
- Begin in a high plank position with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Your body should form a straight line from your head to your heels.
- Bend your elbows at a 45-degree angle to your body and lower your chest to the floor (or as close as possible), keeping your body in a straight line.
- Push through your hands back up to the starting position. Keep your core tight and exhale on your way up.
- Repeat.
3. Renegade row
- Place two dumbbells slightly closer than shoulder-width apart on the ground.
- Grip each dumbbell and come into a high plank, shoulders stacked over hands, feet slightly wider than hip-width apart and your body in a straight line from head to heels.
- Lift your left hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your left hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Lift your right hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your right hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Continue alternating for all reps.
4. Dumbbell lunge
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at your sides (palms facing in), your feet hip-width apart.
- Step your left foot forward, then bend both knees and lower them toward the floor with control.
- Keep lowering until your back knee is about an inch off the ground (or as low as comfortable).
- Push through your front heel to return to standing.
- Repeat on opposite leg.
5. Dumbbell push press
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Dip your lower-body slightly by bending your knees, then explosively press the dumbbells overhead (using your legs to help drive the weight up).
- Exhale as you drive overhead and straighten your knees.
- Return the dumbbells to your shoulders.
- Repeat.
6. Glute bridge
- Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor, arms down by your sides.
- Lift your hips by squeezing your glutes, creating a straight line from shoulders to knees.
- Lower back down with control.
- Repeat.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout.” —Josh York, CPT
Who circuit training is best for
Circuit training can be a good fit for a variety of people, especially since it can be tailored to your unique goals. According to Nielsen-Consiglieri, this can include:
- Beginners
- Busy, time-strapped individuals
- Those who want to improve general fitness
- People with limited equipment or space
- Athletes or fitness enthusiasts
It’s also a great option if you tend to get bored easily.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout,” York says.
Safety tips
Before you dive into a circuit training workout, make sure you warm up properly to increase your body temperature, boost your blood flow, and loosen your muscles. York recommends five to 10 minutes of dynamic warmups, such as jumping jacks, light jogging, or arm circles.
Next, get your equipment and space in order. Circuit training is already intense, so there’s no need to push beyond your limits when it comes to the weights you’re using (if your workout includes equipment).
Also make sure you have enough room to do the various exercises in your circuit. “You don’t want to feel cramped in the middle of your session, or risk injury by bumping into another gym-goer,” Dickson says.
Because of the intensity and lack of breaks with circuit training, it’s key to watch your form (focus on this over weight or reps) and slow down as needed. Don’t be hard on yourself if you end up needing to take a longer break during your circuit training. Also look out for signs that you may have pushed yourself too far.
“This can be an intense workout—and feeling dizzy, nauseous or weak can be a sign of overdoing it,” York says. “If you feel any of these, you should immediately stop the workout.”
Finally, while it’s important to stay hydrated during any workout, circuit training can get especially sweaty (and, as a result, dehydrating). Drink water before rounds to restore your fluid levels.
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When you first hear “circuit training,” it may sound somewhat complicated. However, it’s actually a very straightforward way to improve your endurance and strength.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session (all while keeping your boredom at bay).
Here’s everything you need to know about circuit training, plus a sample workout to try.
What is circuit training?
Circuit training is a sequence of exercises performed with minimum rest between each one.
“Each exercise targets different muscle groups, providing a comprehensive workout that combines both strength training and cardiovascular conditioning,” says Laurie Nielsen-Consiglieri, CPT, a certified personal trainer and district fitness manager at 24 Hour Fitness.
In other words, circuit training is really about how you structure your workouts, rather than any one particular type of exercise. In circuit training, you’ll do each move for a certain number of reps or amount of time, then quickly move on to the next exercise.
“Because it’s so fast-paced, you can usually get a great workout done in about 30 to 45 minutes,” says Josh York, CPT, a certified personal trainer and founder and CEO of GYMGUYZ, a personal training company.
Circuit training benefits
That time efficiency is one reason many people love circuit workouts, which can still help you get the combined benefits of both strength training and aerobic exercise in less time.
“You can get a solid workout in a fraction of the time it would take you to perform a complete weight-lifting routine or cardio workout separately,” says Jake Dickson, CPT, a certified personal trainer at Barbend.
Circuit training can easily be customized to fit various fitness levels and goals—and can be done with or without equipment.
This type of workout also has several health benefits, says Nielsen-Consiglieri, such as:
- Improving cardiovascular health
- Increasing strength and muscle tone
- Enhancing metabolism
- Boosting endurance and stamina
- Providing a full-body workout
In fact, those who did circuit-based training saw more improvements in strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, and body composition (decreased fat mass) compared to control groups in a 2021 review in the journal Biology.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session.
Circuit training drawbacks
Because circuit training involves high-intensity movements with minimal rest, it can sometimes lead to muscle strains or sprains. It’s important to listen to your body throughout the workout.
“The biggest drawback of circuit training is that it may not allow for sufficient recovery time between exercises,” says Stacy Orsborn, CPT, a certified personal trainer and co-founder and president of fitness at VICTRESS MVMT, a fitness training facility in Lincoln, Nebraska.
As a result, circuit training may lead to fatigue, which can compromise form and increase the risk of injury—particularly for beginners, women in certain stages of life like perimenopause or postmenopause, or those with already high levels of stress in their daily lives, Orsborn says.
Circuit training is also not a quick fix for many specific fitness goals.
“While it’s great for general fitness, it might not be the best choice if you have specific goals, such as achieving a certain level of strength or training for a marathon,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Finally, circuit training can eventually result in you plateauing if you don’t introduce enough variety into your workouts.
“Doing the same circuit repeatedly can lead to your body adapting, which might slow your progress,” York says. “To keep seeing improvements, try mixing up your routine and adding new challenges.” (In case you’re wondering, here’s how often to switch up your workout routine.)
Does circuit training count as cardio?
Yes, because you’re moving quickly from one exercise to another with minimal rest.
“This can elevate your heart rate and provide cardio benefits,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Also known as aerobic or endurance exercise, you can think of cardio as anything that boosts your heart rate or gets you breathing a little harder, per Harvard Medical School.
Although exercises like running, swimming, dancing, or hiking are traditionally thought of as cardio staples, circuit training also counts, since the sustained high effort elevates your heart rate throughout the workout, Dickson adds.
Does circuit training count as strength training?
It can, but it depends on what type of resistance exercises it incorporates.
“When a circuit incorporates resistance exercises like push-ups, squats, lunges, or weightlifting movements, it can build strength and muscle tone,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
The effectiveness of circuit training for strengthening will depend on the specific exercises, resistance levels, and structure of the workout.
“While it can be less physically demanding than other resistance training, circuit training can still assist in building stronger muscles,” York says. “The circuit can be designed to target your upper body, lower body, and core, for instance.”
Is circuit training the same as HIIT?
Not quite: While both involve interval training with rest, there are key differences.
“One of the biggest differences is that circuit training can be performed at various intensities, whereas HIIT [high-intensity interval training] requires your full effort, with the goal of hitting 80 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate,” York says.
Circuit training rotates through a series of moderate-intensity exercises that target different muscle groups with almost no rest between each one. HIIT, on the other hand, can involve a single exercise or multiple ones that are performed at maximum intensity for short intervals, followed by rest.
The structure of intervals is another difference, York adds. Circuit training can be based on either time or repetition intervals (say, completing an exercise for 30 seconds or completing an exercise 10 times). HIIT, on the other hand, tends to focus more exclusively on time intervals.
A sample circuit workout to add to your routine
For a quick circuit training workout at home, try this routine designed by Orsborn.
Perform each exercise for 45 seconds, followed by 15 seconds of rest before moving to the next exercise (that counts as one round). Complete four rounds total, resting for one to two minutes between rounds.
1. Dumbbell squat
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Bend your knees as you push your hips back to lower toward the floor, pretending you were going to sit on a chair.
- Lower down as far as comfortable, or until your thighs are parallel with the floor.
- Make sure your knees track over your toes throughout the movement.
- Drive through your heels to return to standing.
- Repeat.
2. Push-up
- Begin in a high plank position with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Your body should form a straight line from your head to your heels.
- Bend your elbows at a 45-degree angle to your body and lower your chest to the floor (or as close as possible), keeping your body in a straight line.
- Push through your hands back up to the starting position. Keep your core tight and exhale on your way up.
- Repeat.
3. Renegade row
- Place two dumbbells slightly closer than shoulder-width apart on the ground.
- Grip each dumbbell and come into a high plank, shoulders stacked over hands, feet slightly wider than hip-width apart and your body in a straight line from head to heels.
- Lift your left hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your left hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Lift your right hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your right hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Continue alternating for all reps.
4. Dumbbell lunge
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at your sides (palms facing in), your feet hip-width apart.
- Step your left foot forward, then bend both knees and lower them toward the floor with control.
- Keep lowering until your back knee is about an inch off the ground (or as low as comfortable).
- Push through your front heel to return to standing.
- Repeat on opposite leg.
5. Dumbbell push press
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Dip your lower-body slightly by bending your knees, then explosively press the dumbbells overhead (using your legs to help drive the weight up).
- Exhale as you drive overhead and straighten your knees.
- Return the dumbbells to your shoulders.
- Repeat.
6. Glute bridge
- Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor, arms down by your sides.
- Lift your hips by squeezing your glutes, creating a straight line from shoulders to knees.
- Lower back down with control.
- Repeat.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout.” —Josh York, CPT
Who circuit training is best for
Circuit training can be a good fit for a variety of people, especially since it can be tailored to your unique goals. According to Nielsen-Consiglieri, this can include:
- Beginners
- Busy, time-strapped individuals
- Those who want to improve general fitness
- People with limited equipment or space
- Athletes or fitness enthusiasts
It’s also a great option if you tend to get bored easily.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout,” York says.
Safety tips
Before you dive into a circuit training workout, make sure you warm up properly to increase your body temperature, boost your blood flow, and loosen your muscles. York recommends five to 10 minutes of dynamic warmups, such as jumping jacks, light jogging, or arm circles.
Next, get your equipment and space in order. Circuit training is already intense, so there’s no need to push beyond your limits when it comes to the weights you’re using (if your workout includes equipment).
Also make sure you have enough room to do the various exercises in your circuit. “You don’t want to feel cramped in the middle of your session, or risk injury by bumping into another gym-goer,” Dickson says.
Because of the intensity and lack of breaks with circuit training, it’s key to watch your form (focus on this over weight or reps) and slow down as needed. Don’t be hard on yourself if you end up needing to take a longer break during your circuit training. Also look out for signs that you may have pushed yourself too far.
“This can be an intense workout—and feeling dizzy, nauseous or weak can be a sign of overdoing it,” York says. “If you feel any of these, you should immediately stop the workout.”
Finally, while it’s important to stay hydrated during any workout, circuit training can get especially sweaty (and, as a result, dehydrating). Drink water before rounds to restore your fluid levels.
New Research Shows Fewer People Are Using Hormone Therapy for Menopause Despite Its Proven Benefits
The stigma attached to the treatment based on a 2002 study has been hard to shake.
When you first hear “circuit training,” it may sound somewhat complicated. However, it’s actually a very straightforward way to improve your endurance and strength.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session (all while keeping your boredom at bay).
Here’s everything you need to know about circuit training, plus a sample workout to try.
What is circuit training?
Circuit training is a sequence of exercises performed with minimum rest between each one.
“Each exercise targets different muscle groups, providing a comprehensive workout that combines both strength training and cardiovascular conditioning,” says Laurie Nielsen-Consiglieri, CPT, a certified personal trainer and district fitness manager at 24 Hour Fitness.
In other words, circuit training is really about how you structure your workouts, rather than any one particular type of exercise. In circuit training, you’ll do each move for a certain number of reps or amount of time, then quickly move on to the next exercise.
“Because it’s so fast-paced, you can usually get a great workout done in about 30 to 45 minutes,” says Josh York, CPT, a certified personal trainer and founder and CEO of GYMGUYZ, a personal training company.
Circuit training benefits
That time efficiency is one reason many people love circuit workouts, which can still help you get the combined benefits of both strength training and aerobic exercise in less time.
“You can get a solid workout in a fraction of the time it would take you to perform a complete weight-lifting routine or cardio workout separately,” says Jake Dickson, CPT, a certified personal trainer at Barbend.
Circuit training can easily be customized to fit various fitness levels and goals—and can be done with or without equipment.
This type of workout also has several health benefits, says Nielsen-Consiglieri, such as:
- Improving cardiovascular health
- Increasing strength and muscle tone
- Enhancing metabolism
- Boosting endurance and stamina
- Providing a full-body workout
In fact, those who did circuit-based training saw more improvements in strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, and body composition (decreased fat mass) compared to control groups in a 2021 review in the journal Biology.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session.
Circuit training drawbacks
Because circuit training involves high-intensity movements with minimal rest, it can sometimes lead to muscle strains or sprains. It’s important to listen to your body throughout the workout.
“The biggest drawback of circuit training is that it may not allow for sufficient recovery time between exercises,” says Stacy Orsborn, CPT, a certified personal trainer and co-founder and president of fitness at VICTRESS MVMT, a fitness training facility in Lincoln, Nebraska.
As a result, circuit training may lead to fatigue, which can compromise form and increase the risk of injury—particularly for beginners, women in certain stages of life like perimenopause or postmenopause, or those with already high levels of stress in their daily lives, Orsborn says.
Circuit training is also not a quick fix for many specific fitness goals.
“While it’s great for general fitness, it might not be the best choice if you have specific goals, such as achieving a certain level of strength or training for a marathon,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Finally, circuit training can eventually result in you plateauing if you don’t introduce enough variety into your workouts.
“Doing the same circuit repeatedly can lead to your body adapting, which might slow your progress,” York says. “To keep seeing improvements, try mixing up your routine and adding new challenges.” (In case you’re wondering, here’s how often to switch up your workout routine.)
Does circuit training count as cardio?
Yes, because you’re moving quickly from one exercise to another with minimal rest.
“This can elevate your heart rate and provide cardio benefits,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Also known as aerobic or endurance exercise, you can think of cardio as anything that boosts your heart rate or gets you breathing a little harder, per Harvard Medical School.
Although exercises like running, swimming, dancing, or hiking are traditionally thought of as cardio staples, circuit training also counts, since the sustained high effort elevates your heart rate throughout the workout, Dickson adds.
Does circuit training count as strength training?
It can, but it depends on what type of resistance exercises it incorporates.
“When a circuit incorporates resistance exercises like push-ups, squats, lunges, or weightlifting movements, it can build strength and muscle tone,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
The effectiveness of circuit training for strengthening will depend on the specific exercises, resistance levels, and structure of the workout.
“While it can be less physically demanding than other resistance training, circuit training can still assist in building stronger muscles,” York says. “The circuit can be designed to target your upper body, lower body, and core, for instance.”
Is circuit training the same as HIIT?
Not quite: While both involve interval training with rest, there are key differences.
“One of the biggest differences is that circuit training can be performed at various intensities, whereas HIIT [high-intensity interval training] requires your full effort, with the goal of hitting 80 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate,” York says.
Circuit training rotates through a series of moderate-intensity exercises that target different muscle groups with almost no rest between each one. HIIT, on the other hand, can involve a single exercise or multiple ones that are performed at maximum intensity for short intervals, followed by rest.
The structure of intervals is another difference, York adds. Circuit training can be based on either time or repetition intervals (say, completing an exercise for 30 seconds or completing an exercise 10 times). HIIT, on the other hand, tends to focus more exclusively on time intervals.
A sample circuit workout to add to your routine
For a quick circuit training workout at home, try this routine designed by Orsborn.
Perform each exercise for 45 seconds, followed by 15 seconds of rest before moving to the next exercise (that counts as one round). Complete four rounds total, resting for one to two minutes between rounds.
1. Dumbbell squat
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Bend your knees as you push your hips back to lower toward the floor, pretending you were going to sit on a chair.
- Lower down as far as comfortable, or until your thighs are parallel with the floor.
- Make sure your knees track over your toes throughout the movement.
- Drive through your heels to return to standing.
- Repeat.
2. Push-up
- Begin in a high plank position with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Your body should form a straight line from your head to your heels.
- Bend your elbows at a 45-degree angle to your body and lower your chest to the floor (or as close as possible), keeping your body in a straight line.
- Push through your hands back up to the starting position. Keep your core tight and exhale on your way up.
- Repeat.
3. Renegade row
- Place two dumbbells slightly closer than shoulder-width apart on the ground.
- Grip each dumbbell and come into a high plank, shoulders stacked over hands, feet slightly wider than hip-width apart and your body in a straight line from head to heels.
- Lift your left hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your left hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Lift your right hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your right hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Continue alternating for all reps.
4. Dumbbell lunge
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at your sides (palms facing in), your feet hip-width apart.
- Step your left foot forward, then bend both knees and lower them toward the floor with control.
- Keep lowering until your back knee is about an inch off the ground (or as low as comfortable).
- Push through your front heel to return to standing.
- Repeat on opposite leg.
5. Dumbbell push press
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Dip your lower-body slightly by bending your knees, then explosively press the dumbbells overhead (using your legs to help drive the weight up).
- Exhale as you drive overhead and straighten your knees.
- Return the dumbbells to your shoulders.
- Repeat.
6. Glute bridge
- Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor, arms down by your sides.
- Lift your hips by squeezing your glutes, creating a straight line from shoulders to knees.
- Lower back down with control.
- Repeat.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout.” —Josh York, CPT
Who circuit training is best for
Circuit training can be a good fit for a variety of people, especially since it can be tailored to your unique goals. According to Nielsen-Consiglieri, this can include:
- Beginners
- Busy, time-strapped individuals
- Those who want to improve general fitness
- People with limited equipment or space
- Athletes or fitness enthusiasts
It’s also a great option if you tend to get bored easily.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout,” York says.
Safety tips
Before you dive into a circuit training workout, make sure you warm up properly to increase your body temperature, boost your blood flow, and loosen your muscles. York recommends five to 10 minutes of dynamic warmups, such as jumping jacks, light jogging, or arm circles.
Next, get your equipment and space in order. Circuit training is already intense, so there’s no need to push beyond your limits when it comes to the weights you’re using (if your workout includes equipment).
Also make sure you have enough room to do the various exercises in your circuit. “You don’t want to feel cramped in the middle of your session, or risk injury by bumping into another gym-goer,” Dickson says.
Because of the intensity and lack of breaks with circuit training, it’s key to watch your form (focus on this over weight or reps) and slow down as needed. Don’t be hard on yourself if you end up needing to take a longer break during your circuit training. Also look out for signs that you may have pushed yourself too far.
“This can be an intense workout—and feeling dizzy, nauseous or weak can be a sign of overdoing it,” York says. “If you feel any of these, you should immediately stop the workout.”
Finally, while it’s important to stay hydrated during any workout, circuit training can get especially sweaty (and, as a result, dehydrating). Drink water before rounds to restore your fluid levels.
Get a Super Effective Cardio and Strength Workout All in One With Circuit Training. Here’s How
It’s a time-efficient way to get in an amazing sweat sesh.
When you first hear “circuit training,” it may sound somewhat complicated. However, it’s actually a very straightforward way to improve your endurance and strength.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session (all while keeping your boredom at bay).
Here’s everything you need to know about circuit training, plus a sample workout to try.
What is circuit training?
Circuit training is a sequence of exercises performed with minimum rest between each one.
“Each exercise targets different muscle groups, providing a comprehensive workout that combines both strength training and cardiovascular conditioning,” says Laurie Nielsen-Consiglieri, CPT, a certified personal trainer and district fitness manager at 24 Hour Fitness.
In other words, circuit training is really about how you structure your workouts, rather than any one particular type of exercise. In circuit training, you’ll do each move for a certain number of reps or amount of time, then quickly move on to the next exercise.
“Because it’s so fast-paced, you can usually get a great workout done in about 30 to 45 minutes,” says Josh York, CPT, a certified personal trainer and founder and CEO of GYMGUYZ, a personal training company.
Circuit training benefits
That time efficiency is one reason many people love circuit workouts, which can still help you get the combined benefits of both strength training and aerobic exercise in less time.
“You can get a solid workout in a fraction of the time it would take you to perform a complete weight-lifting routine or cardio workout separately,” says Jake Dickson, CPT, a certified personal trainer at Barbend.
Circuit training can easily be customized to fit various fitness levels and goals—and can be done with or without equipment.
This type of workout also has several health benefits, says Nielsen-Consiglieri, such as:
- Improving cardiovascular health
- Increasing strength and muscle tone
- Enhancing metabolism
- Boosting endurance and stamina
- Providing a full-body workout
In fact, those who did circuit-based training saw more improvements in strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, and body composition (decreased fat mass) compared to control groups in a 2021 review in the journal Biology.
Circuit training workouts incorporate a variety of exercises that can be tailored to practically any fitness level. What’s more, they may help you combine two workouts into one for a more efficient session.
Circuit training drawbacks
Because circuit training involves high-intensity movements with minimal rest, it can sometimes lead to muscle strains or sprains. It’s important to listen to your body throughout the workout.
“The biggest drawback of circuit training is that it may not allow for sufficient recovery time between exercises,” says Stacy Orsborn, CPT, a certified personal trainer and co-founder and president of fitness at VICTRESS MVMT, a fitness training facility in Lincoln, Nebraska.
As a result, circuit training may lead to fatigue, which can compromise form and increase the risk of injury—particularly for beginners, women in certain stages of life like perimenopause or postmenopause, or those with already high levels of stress in their daily lives, Orsborn says.
Circuit training is also not a quick fix for many specific fitness goals.
“While it’s great for general fitness, it might not be the best choice if you have specific goals, such as achieving a certain level of strength or training for a marathon,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Finally, circuit training can eventually result in you plateauing if you don’t introduce enough variety into your workouts.
“Doing the same circuit repeatedly can lead to your body adapting, which might slow your progress,” York says. “To keep seeing improvements, try mixing up your routine and adding new challenges.” (In case you’re wondering, here’s how often to switch up your workout routine.)
Does circuit training count as cardio?
Yes, because you’re moving quickly from one exercise to another with minimal rest.
“This can elevate your heart rate and provide cardio benefits,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
Also known as aerobic or endurance exercise, you can think of cardio as anything that boosts your heart rate or gets you breathing a little harder, per Harvard Medical School.
Although exercises like running, swimming, dancing, or hiking are traditionally thought of as cardio staples, circuit training also counts, since the sustained high effort elevates your heart rate throughout the workout, Dickson adds.
Does circuit training count as strength training?
It can, but it depends on what type of resistance exercises it incorporates.
“When a circuit incorporates resistance exercises like push-ups, squats, lunges, or weightlifting movements, it can build strength and muscle tone,” Nielsen-Consiglieri says.
The effectiveness of circuit training for strengthening will depend on the specific exercises, resistance levels, and structure of the workout.
“While it can be less physically demanding than other resistance training, circuit training can still assist in building stronger muscles,” York says. “The circuit can be designed to target your upper body, lower body, and core, for instance.”
Is circuit training the same as HIIT?
Not quite: While both involve interval training with rest, there are key differences.
“One of the biggest differences is that circuit training can be performed at various intensities, whereas HIIT [high-intensity interval training] requires your full effort, with the goal of hitting 80 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate,” York says.
Circuit training rotates through a series of moderate-intensity exercises that target different muscle groups with almost no rest between each one. HIIT, on the other hand, can involve a single exercise or multiple ones that are performed at maximum intensity for short intervals, followed by rest.
The structure of intervals is another difference, York adds. Circuit training can be based on either time or repetition intervals (say, completing an exercise for 30 seconds or completing an exercise 10 times). HIIT, on the other hand, tends to focus more exclusively on time intervals.
A sample circuit workout to add to your routine
For a quick circuit training workout at home, try this routine designed by Orsborn.
Perform each exercise for 45 seconds, followed by 15 seconds of rest before moving to the next exercise (that counts as one round). Complete four rounds total, resting for one to two minutes between rounds.
1. Dumbbell squat
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Bend your knees as you push your hips back to lower toward the floor, pretending you were going to sit on a chair.
- Lower down as far as comfortable, or until your thighs are parallel with the floor.
- Make sure your knees track over your toes throughout the movement.
- Drive through your heels to return to standing.
- Repeat.
2. Push-up
- Begin in a high plank position with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Your body should form a straight line from your head to your heels.
- Bend your elbows at a 45-degree angle to your body and lower your chest to the floor (or as close as possible), keeping your body in a straight line.
- Push through your hands back up to the starting position. Keep your core tight and exhale on your way up.
- Repeat.
3. Renegade row
- Place two dumbbells slightly closer than shoulder-width apart on the ground.
- Grip each dumbbell and come into a high plank, shoulders stacked over hands, feet slightly wider than hip-width apart and your body in a straight line from head to heels.
- Lift your left hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your left hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Lift your right hand off the floor, pulling the dumbbell to the top of your ribcage.
- Lower your right hand back onto the floor in starting position.
- Continue alternating for all reps.
4. Dumbbell lunge
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at your sides (palms facing in), your feet hip-width apart.
- Step your left foot forward, then bend both knees and lower them toward the floor with control.
- Keep lowering until your back knee is about an inch off the ground (or as low as comfortable).
- Push through your front heel to return to standing.
- Repeat on opposite leg.
5. Dumbbell push press
- Hold a dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, with feet shoulder-width apart.
- Dip your lower-body slightly by bending your knees, then explosively press the dumbbells overhead (using your legs to help drive the weight up).
- Exhale as you drive overhead and straighten your knees.
- Return the dumbbells to your shoulders.
- Repeat.
6. Glute bridge
- Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor, arms down by your sides.
- Lift your hips by squeezing your glutes, creating a straight line from shoulders to knees.
- Lower back down with control.
- Repeat.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout.” —Josh York, CPT
Who circuit training is best for
Circuit training can be a good fit for a variety of people, especially since it can be tailored to your unique goals. According to Nielsen-Consiglieri, this can include:
- Beginners
- Busy, time-strapped individuals
- Those who want to improve general fitness
- People with limited equipment or space
- Athletes or fitness enthusiasts
It’s also a great option if you tend to get bored easily.
“If you are someone that likes to move around constantly, circuit training would provide a great alternative to a traditional one-exercise-at-a-time workout,” York says.
Safety tips
Before you dive into a circuit training workout, make sure you warm up properly to increase your body temperature, boost your blood flow, and loosen your muscles. York recommends five to 10 minutes of dynamic warmups, such as jumping jacks, light jogging, or arm circles.
Next, get your equipment and space in order. Circuit training is already intense, so there’s no need to push beyond your limits when it comes to the weights you’re using (if your workout includes equipment).
Also make sure you have enough room to do the various exercises in your circuit. “You don’t want to feel cramped in the middle of your session, or risk injury by bumping into another gym-goer,” Dickson says.
Because of the intensity and lack of breaks with circuit training, it’s key to watch your form (focus on this over weight or reps) and slow down as needed. Don’t be hard on yourself if you end up needing to take a longer break during your circuit training. Also look out for signs that you may have pushed yourself too far.
“This can be an intense workout—and feeling dizzy, nauseous or weak can be a sign of overdoing it,” York says. “If you feel any of these, you should immediately stop the workout.”
Finally, while it’s important to stay hydrated during any workout, circuit training can get especially sweaty (and, as a result, dehydrating). Drink water before rounds to restore your fluid levels.
How to Sell UX Research with Two Simple Questions
Do you find yourself designing screens with only a vague idea of how the things on the screen relate to the things elsewhere in the system? Do you leave stakeholder meetings with unclear directives that often seem to contradict previous conversations? You know a better understanding of user needs would help the team get clear on what you are actually trying to accomplish, but time and budget for research is tight. When it comes to asking for more direct contact with your users, you might feel like poor Oliver Twist, timidly asking, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
Here’s the trick. You need to get stakeholders themselves to identify high-risk assumptions and hidden complexity, so that they become just as motivated as you to get answers from users. Basically, you need to make them think it’s their idea.
In this article, I’ll show you how to collaboratively expose misalignment and gaps in the team’s shared understanding by bringing the team together around two simple questions:
- What are the objects?
- What are the relationships between those objects?
A gauntlet between research and screen design
These two questions align to the first two steps of the ORCA process, which might become your new best friend when it comes to reducing guesswork. Wait, what’s ORCA?! Glad you asked.
ORCA stands for Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes, and it outlines a process for creating solid object-oriented user experiences. Object-oriented UX is my design philosophy. ORCA is an iterative methodology for synthesizing user research into an elegant structural foundation to support screen and interaction design. OOUX and ORCA have made my work as a UX designer more collaborative, effective, efficient, fun, strategic, and meaningful.
The ORCA process has four iterative rounds and a whopping fifteen steps. In each round we get more clarity on our Os, Rs, Cs, and As.
I sometimes say that ORCA is a “garbage in, garbage out” process. To ensure that the testable prototype produced in the final round actually tests well, the process needs to be fed by good research. But if you don’t have a ton of research, the beginning of the ORCA process serves another purpose: it helps you sell the need for research.
In other words, the ORCA process serves as a gauntlet between research and design. With good research, you can gracefully ride the killer whale from research into design. But without good research, the process effectively spits you back into research and with a cache of specific open questions.
Getting in the same curiosity-boat
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
Mark Twain
The first two steps of the ORCA process—Object Discovery and Relationship Discovery—shine a spotlight on the dark, dusty corners of your team’s misalignments and any inherent complexity that’s been swept under the rug. It begins to expose what this classic comic so beautifully illustrates:
This is one reason why so many UX designers are frustrated in their job and why many projects fail. And this is also why we often can’t sell research: every decision-maker is confident in their own mental picture.
Once we expose hidden fuzzy patches in each picture and the differences between them all, the case for user research makes itself.
But how we do this is important. However much we might want to, we can’t just tell everyone, “YOU ARE WRONG!” Instead, we need to facilitate and guide our team members to self-identify holes in their picture. When stakeholders take ownership of assumptions and gaps in understanding, BAM! Suddenly, UX research is not such a hard sell, and everyone is aboard the same curiosity-boat.
Say your users are doctors. And you have no idea how doctors use the system you are tasked with redesigning.
You might try to sell research by honestly saying: “We need to understand doctors better! What are their pain points? How do they use the current app?” But here’s the problem with that. Those questions are vague, and the answers to them don’t feel acutely actionable.
Instead, you want your stakeholders themselves to ask super-specific questions. This is more like the kind of conversation you need to facilitate. Let’s listen in:
“Wait a sec, how often do doctors share patients? Does a patient in this system have primary and secondary doctors?”
“Can a patient even have more than one primary doctor?”
“Is it a ‘primary doctor’ or just a ‘primary caregiver’… Can’t that role be a nurse practitioner?”
“No, caregivers are something else… That’s the patient’s family contacts, right?”
“So are caregivers in scope for this redesign?”
“Yeah, because if a caregiver is present at an appointment, the doctor needs to note that. Like, tag the caregiver on the note… Or on the appointment?”
Now we are getting somewhere. Do you see how powerful it can be getting stakeholders to debate these questions themselves? The diabolical goal here is to shake their confidence—gently and diplomatically.
When these kinds of questions bubble up collaboratively and come directly from the mouths of your stakeholders and decision-makers, suddenly, designing screens without knowing the answers to these questions seems incredibly risky, even silly.
If we create software without understanding the real-world information environment of our users, we will likely create software that does not align to the real-world information environment of our users. And this will, hands down, result in a more confusing, more complex, and less intuitive software product.
The two questions
But how do we get to these kinds of meaty questions diplomatically, efficiently, collaboratively, and reliably?
We can do this by starting with those two big questions that align to the first two steps of the ORCA process:
- What are the objects?
- What are the relationships between those objects?
In practice, getting to these answers is easier said than done. I’m going to show you how these two simple questions can provide the outline for an Object Definition Workshop. During this workshop, these “seed” questions will blossom into dozens of specific questions and shine a spotlight on the need for more user research.
Prep work: Noun foraging
In the next section, I’ll show you how to run an Object Definition Workshop with your stakeholders (and entire cross-functional team, hopefully). But first, you need to do some prep work.
Basically, look for nouns that are particular to the business or industry of your project, and do it across at least a few sources. I call this noun foraging.
Here are just a few great noun foraging sources:
- the product’s marketing site
- the product’s competitors’ marketing sites (competitive analysis, anyone?)
- the existing product (look at labels!)
- user interview transcripts
- notes from stakeholder interviews or vision docs from stakeholders
Put your detective hat on, my dear Watson. Get resourceful and leverage what you have. If all you have is a marketing website, some screenshots of the existing legacy system, and access to customer service chat logs, then use those.
As you peruse these sources, watch for the nouns that are used over and over again, and start listing them (preferably on blue sticky notes if you’ll be creating an object map later!).
You’ll want to focus on nouns that might represent objects in your system. If you are having trouble determining if a noun might be object-worthy, remember the acronym SIP and test for:
- Structure
- Instances
- Purpose
Think of a library app, for example. Is “book” an object?
Structure: can you think of a few attributes for this potential object? Title, author, publish date… Yep, it has structure. Check!
Instance: what are some examples of this potential “book” object? Can you name a few? The Alchemist, Ready Player One, Everybody Poops… OK, check!
Purpose: why is this object important to the users and business? Well, “book” is what our library client is providing to people and books are why people come to the library… Check, check, check!
As you are noun foraging, focus on capturing the nouns that have SIP. Avoid capturing components like dropdowns, checkboxes, and calendar pickers—your UX system is not your design system! Components are just the packaging for objects—they are a means to an end. No one is coming to your digital place to play with your dropdown! They are coming for the VALUABLE THINGS and what they can do with them. Those things, or objects, are what we are trying to identify.
Let’s say we work for a startup disrupting the email experience. This is how I’d start my noun foraging.
First I’d look at my own email client, which happens to be Gmail. I’d then look at Outlook and the new HEY email. I’d look at Yahoo, Hotmail…I’d even look at Slack and Basecamp and other so-called “email replacers.” I’d read some articles, reviews, and forum threads where people are complaining about email. While doing all this, I would look for and write down the nouns.
(Before moving on, feel free to go noun foraging for this hypothetical product, too, and then scroll down to see how much our lists match up. Just don’t get lost in your own emails! Come back to me!)
Drumroll, please…
Here are a few nouns I came up with during my noun foraging:
- email message
- thread
- contact
- client
- rule/automation
- email address that is not a contact?
- contact groups
- attachment
- Google doc file / other integrated file
- newsletter? (HEY treats this differently)
- saved responses and templates
Scan your list of nouns and pick out words that you are completely clueless about. In our email example, it might be client or automation. Do as much homework as you can before your session with stakeholders: google what’s googleable. But other terms might be so specific to the product or domain that you need to have a conversation about them.
Aside: here are some real nouns foraged during my own past project work that I needed my stakeholders to help me understand:
- Record Locator
- Incentive Home
- Augmented Line Item
- Curriculum-Based Measurement Probe
This is really all you need to prepare for the workshop session: a list of nouns that represent potential objects and a short list of nouns that need to be defined further.
Facilitate an Object Definition Workshop
You could actually start your workshop with noun foraging—this activity can be done collaboratively. If you have five people in the room, pick five sources, assign one to every person, and give everyone ten minutes to find the objects within their source. When the time’s up, come together and find the overlap. Affinity mapping is your friend here!
If your team is short on time and might be reluctant to do this kind of grunt work (which is usually the case) do your own noun foraging beforehand, but be prepared to show your work. I love presenting screenshots of documents and screens with all the nouns already highlighted. Bring the artifacts of your process, and start the workshop with a five-minute overview of your noun foraging journey.
HOT TIP: before jumping into the workshop, frame the conversation as a requirements-gathering session to help you better understand the scope and details of the system. You don’t need to let them know that you’re looking for gaps in the team’s understanding so that you can prove the need for more user research—that will be our little secret. Instead, go into the session optimistically, as if your knowledgeable stakeholders and PMs and biz folks already have all the answers.
Then, let the question whack-a-mole commence.
1. What is this thing?
Want to have some real fun? At the beginning of your session, ask stakeholders to privately write definitions for the handful of obscure nouns you might be uncertain about. Then, have everyone show their cards at the same time and see if you get different definitions (you will). This is gold for exposing misalignment and starting great conversations.
As your discussion unfolds, capture any agreed-upon definitions. And when uncertainty emerges, quietly (but visibly) start an “open questions” parking lot. 😉
After definitions solidify, here’s a great follow-up:
2. Do our users know what these things are? What do users call this thing?
Stakeholder 1: They probably call email clients “apps.” But I’m not sure.
Stakeholder 2: Automations are often called “workflows,” I think. Or, maybe users think workflows are something different.
If a more user-friendly term emerges, ask the group if they can agree to use only that term moving forward. This way, the team can better align to the users’ language and mindset.
OK, moving on.
If you have two or more objects that seem to overlap in purpose, ask one of these questions:
3. Are these the same thing? Or are these different? If they are not the same, how are they different?
You: Is a saved response the same as a template?
Stakeholder 1: Yes! Definitely.
Stakeholder 2: I don’t think so… A saved response is text with links and variables, but a template is more about the look and feel, like default fonts, colors, and placeholder images.
Continue to build out your growing glossary of objects. And continue to capture areas of uncertainty in your “open questions” parking lot.
If you successfully determine that two similar things are, in fact, different, here’s your next follow-up question:
4. What’s the relationship between these objects?
You: Are saved responses and templates related in any way?
Stakeholder 3: Yeah, a template can be applied to a saved response.
You, always with the follow-ups: When is the template applied to a saved response? Does that happen when the user is constructing the saved response? Or when they apply the saved response to an email? How does that actually work?
Listen. Capture uncertainty. Once the list of “open questions” grows to a critical mass, pause to start assigning questions to groups or individuals. Some questions might be for the dev team (hopefully at least one developer is in the room with you). One question might be specifically for someone who couldn’t make it to the workshop. And many questions will need to be labeled “user.”
Do you see how we are building up to our UXR sales pitch?
5. Is this object in scope?
Your next question narrows the team’s focus toward what’s most important to your users. You can simply ask, “Are saved responses in scope for our first release?,” but I’ve got a better, more devious strategy.
By now, you should have a list of clearly defined objects. Ask participants to sort these objects from most to least important, either in small breakout groups or individually. Then, like you did with the definitions, have everyone reveal their sort order at once. Surprisingly—or not so surprisingly—it’s not unusual for the VP to rank something like “saved responses” as #2 while everyone else puts it at the bottom of the list. Try not to look too smug as you inevitably expose more misalignment.
I did this for a startup a few years ago. We posted the three groups’ wildly different sort orders on the whiteboard.
The CEO stood back, looked at it, and said, “This is why we haven’t been able to move forward in two years.”
Admittedly, it’s tragic to hear that, but as a professional, it feels pretty awesome to be the one who facilitated a watershed realization.
Once you have a good idea of in-scope, clearly defined things, this is when you move on to doing more relationship mapping.
6. Create a visual representation of the objects’ relationships
We’ve already done a bit of this while trying to determine if two things are different, but this time, ask the team about every potential relationship. For each object, ask how it relates to all the other objects. In what ways are the objects connected? To visualize all the connections, pull out your trusty boxes-and-arrows technique. Here, we are connecting our objects with verbs. I like to keep my verbs to simple “has a” and “has many” statements.
This system modeling activity brings up all sorts of new questions:
- Can a saved response have attachments?
- Can a saved response use a template? If so, if an email uses a saved response with a template, can the user override that template?
- Do users want to see all the emails they sent that included a particular attachment? For example, “show me all the emails I sent with ProfessionalImage.jpg attached. I’ve changed my professional photo and I want to alert everyone to update it.”
Solid answers might emerge directly from the workshop participants. Great! Capture that new shared understanding. But when uncertainty surfaces, continue to add questions to your growing parking lot.
Light the fuse
You’ve positioned the explosives all along the floodgates. Now you simply have to light the fuse and BOOM. Watch the buy-in for user research flooooow.
Before your workshop wraps up, have the group reflect on the list of open questions. Make plans for getting answers internally, then focus on the questions that need to be brought before users.
Here’s your final step. Take those questions you’ve compiled for user research and discuss the level of risk associated with NOT answering them. Ask, “if we design without an answer to this question, if we make up our own answer and we are wrong, how bad might that turn out?”
With this methodology, we are cornering our decision-makers into advocating for user research as they themselves label questions as high-risk. Sorry, not sorry.
Now is your moment of truth. With everyone in the room, ask for a reasonable budget of time and money to conduct 6–8 user interviews focused specifically on these questions.
HOT TIP: if you are new to UX research, please note that you’ll likely need to rephrase the questions that came up during the workshop before you present them to users. Make sure your questions are open-ended and don’t lead the user into any default answers.
Final words: Hold the screen design!
Seriously, if at all possible, do not ever design screens again without first answering these fundamental questions: what are the objects and how do they relate?
I promise you this: if you can secure a shared understanding between the business, design, and development teams before you start designing screens, you will have less heartache and save more time and money, and (it almost feels like a bonus at this point!) users will be more receptive to what you put out into the world.
I sincerely hope this helps you win time and budget to go talk to your users and gain clarity on what you are designing before you start building screens. If you find success using noun foraging and the Object Definition Workshop, there’s more where that came from in the rest of the ORCA process, which will help prevent even more late-in-the-game scope tugs-of-war and strategy pivots.
All the best of luck! Now go sell research!
Breaking Out of the Box
CSS is about styling boxes. In fact, the whole web is made of boxes, from the browser viewport to elements on a page. But every once in a while a new feature comes along that makes us rethink our design approach.
Round displays, for example, make it fun to play with circular clip areas. Mobile screen notches and virtual keyboards offer challenges to best organize content that stays clear of them. And dual screen or foldable devices make us rethink how to best use available space in a number of different device postures.
These recent evolutions of the web platform made it both more challenging and more interesting to design products. They’re great opportunities for us to break out of our rectangular boxes.
I’d like to talk about a new feature similar to the above: the Window Controls Overlay for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).
Progressive Web Apps are blurring the lines between apps and websites. They combine the best of both worlds. On one hand, they’re stable, linkable, searchable, and responsive just like websites. On the other hand, they provide additional powerful capabilities, work offline, and read files just like native apps.
As a design surface, PWAs are really interesting because they challenge us to think about what mixing web and device-native user interfaces can be. On desktop devices in particular, we have more than 40 years of history telling us what applications should look like, and it can be hard to break out of this mental model.
At the end of the day though, PWAs on desktop are constrained to the window they appear in: a rectangle with a title bar at the top.
Here’s what a typical desktop PWA app looks like:
Sure, as the author of a PWA, you get to choose the color of the title bar (using the Web Application Manifest theme_color property), but that’s about it.
What if we could think outside this box, and reclaim the real estate of the app’s entire window? Doing so would give us a chance to make our apps more beautiful and feel more integrated in the operating system.
This is exactly what the Window Controls Overlay offers. This new PWA functionality makes it possible to take advantage of the full surface area of the app, including where the title bar normally appears.
About the title bar and window controls
Let’s start with an explanation of what the title bar and window controls are.
The title bar is the area displayed at the top of an app window, which usually contains the app’s name. Window controls are the affordances, or buttons, that make it possible to minimize, maximize, or close the app’s window, and are also displayed at the top.
Window Controls Overlay removes the physical constraint of the title bar and window controls areas. It frees up the full height of the app window, enabling the title bar and window control buttons to be overlaid on top of the application’s web content.
If you are reading this article on a desktop computer, take a quick look at other apps. Chances are they’re already doing something similar to this. In fact, the very web browser you are using to read this uses the top area to display tabs.
Spotify displays album artwork all the way to the top edge of the application window.
Microsoft Word uses the available title bar space to display the auto-save and search functionalities, and more.
The whole point of this feature is to allow you to make use of this space with your own content while providing a way to account for the window control buttons. And it enables you to offer this modified experience on a range of platforms while not adversely affecting the experience on browsers or devices that don’t support Window Controls Overlay. After all, PWAs are all about progressive enhancement, so this feature is a chance to enhance your app to use this extra space when it’s available.
Let’s use the feature
For the rest of this article, we’ll be working on a demo app to learn more about using the feature.
The demo app is called 1DIV. It’s a simple CSS playground where users can create designs using CSS and a single HTML element.
The app has two pages. The first lists the existing CSS designs you’ve created:
The second page enables you to create and edit CSS designs:
Since I’ve added a simple web manifest and service worker, we can install the app as a PWA on desktop. Here is what it looks like on macOS:
And on Windows:
Our app is looking good, but the white title bar in the first page is wasted space. In the second page, it would be really nice if the design area went all the way to the top of the app window.
Let’s use the Window Controls Overlay feature to improve this.
Enabling Window Controls Overlay
The feature is still experimental at the moment. To try it, you need to enable it in one of the supported browsers.
As of now, it has been implemented in Chromium, as a collaboration between Microsoft and Google. We can therefore use it in Chrome or Edge by going to the internal about://flags page, and enabling the Desktop PWA Window Controls Overlay flag.
Using Window Controls Overlay
To use the feature, we need to add the following display_override member to our web app’s manifest file:
{
"name": "1DIV",
"description": "1DIV is a mini CSS playground",
"lang": "en-US",
"start_url": "/",
"theme_color": "#ffffff",
"background_color": "#ffffff",
"display_override": [
"window-controls-overlay"
],
"icons": [
...
]
}
On the surface, the feature is really simple to use. This manifest change is the only thing we need to make the title bar disappear and turn the window controls into an overlay.
However, to provide a great experience for all users regardless of what device or browser they use, and to make the most of the title bar area in our design, we’ll need a bit of CSS and JavaScript code.
Here is what the app looks like now:
The title bar is gone, which is what we wanted, but our logo, search field, and NEW button are partially covered by the window controls because now our layout starts at the top of the window.
It’s similar on Windows, with the difference that the close, maximize, and minimize buttons appear on the right side, grouped together with the PWA control buttons:
Using CSS to keep clear of the window controls
Along with the feature, new CSS environment variables have been introduced:
titlebar-area-xtitlebar-area-ytitlebar-area-widthtitlebar-area-height
You use these variables with the CSS env() function to position your content where the title bar would have been while ensuring it won’t overlap with the window controls. In our case, we’ll use two of the variables to position our header, which contains the logo, search bar, and NEW button.
header {
position: absolute;
left: env(titlebar-area-x, 0);
width: env(titlebar-area-width, 100%);
height: var(--toolbar-height);
}
The titlebar-area-x variable gives us the distance from the left of the viewport to where the title bar would appear, and titlebar-area-width is its width. (Remember, this is not equivalent to the width of the entire viewport, just the title bar portion, which as noted earlier, doesn’t include the window controls.)
By doing this, we make sure our content remains fully visible. We’re also defining fallback values (the second parameter in the env() function) for when the variables are not defined (such as on non-supporting browsers, or when the Windows Control Overlay feature is disabled).
Now our header adapts to its surroundings, and it doesn’t feel like the window control buttons have been added as an afterthought. The app looks a lot more like a native app.
Changing the window controls background color so it blends in
Now let’s take a closer look at our second page: the CSS playground editor.
Not great. Our CSS demo area does go all the way to the top, which is what we wanted, but the way the window controls appear as white rectangles on top of it is quite jarring.
We can fix this by changing the app’s theme color. There are a couple of ways to define it:
- PWAs can define a theme color in the web app manifest file using the theme_color manifest member. This color is then used by the OS in different ways. On desktop platforms, it is used to provide a background color to the title bar and window controls.
- Websites can use the theme-color meta tag as well. It’s used by browsers to customize the color of the UI around the web page. For PWAs, this color can override the manifest
theme_color.
In our case, we can set the manifest theme_color to white to provide the right default color for our app. The OS will read this color value when the app is installed and use it to make the window controls background color white. This color works great for our main page with the list of demos.
The theme-color meta tag can be changed at runtime, using JavaScript. So we can do that to override the white with the right demo background color when one is opened.
Here is the function we’ll use:
function themeWindow(bgColor) {
document.querySelector("meta[name=theme-color]").setAttribute('content', bgColor);
}With this in place, we can imagine how using color and CSS transitions can produce a smooth change from the list page to the demo page, and enable the window control buttons to blend in with the rest of the app’s interface.
Dragging the window
Now, getting rid of the title bar entirely does have an important accessibility consequence: it’s much more difficult to move the application window around.
The title bar provides a sizable area for users to click and drag, but by using the Window Controls Overlay feature, this area becomes limited to where the control buttons are, and users have to very precisely aim between these buttons to move the window.
Fortunately, this can be fixed using CSS with the app-region property. This property is, for now, only supported in Chromium-based browsers and needs the -webkit- vendor prefix.
To make any element of the app become a dragging target for the window, we can use the following:
-webkit-app-region: drag;
It is also possible to explicitly make an element non-draggable:
-webkit-app-region: no-drag;
These options can be useful for us. We can make the entire header a dragging target, but make the search field and NEW button within it non-draggable so they can still be used as normal.
However, because the editor page doesn’t display the header, users wouldn’t be able to drag the window while editing code. So let’s use a different approach. We’ll create another element before our header, also absolutely positioned, and dedicated to dragging the window.
... .drag {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
width: 100%;
height: env(titlebar-area-height, 0);
-webkit-app-region: drag;
}With the above code, we’re making the draggable area span the entire viewport width, and using the titlebar-area-height variable to make it as tall as what the title bar would have been. This way, our draggable area is aligned with the window control buttons as shown below.
And, now, to make sure our search field and button remain usable:
header .search,
header .new {
-webkit-app-region: no-drag;
}With the above code, users can click and drag where the title bar used to be. It is an area that users expect to be able to use to move windows on desktop, and we’re not breaking this expectation, which is good.
Adapting to window resize
It may be useful for an app to know both whether the window controls overlay is visible and when its size changes. In our case, if the user made the window very narrow, there wouldn’t be enough space for the search field, logo, and button to fit, so we’d want to push them down a bit.
The Window Controls Overlay feature comes with a JavaScript API we can use to do this: navigator.windowControlsOverlay.
The API provides three interesting things:
navigator.windowControlsOverlay.visiblelets us know whether the overlay is visible.navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect()lets us know the position and size of the title bar area.navigator.windowControlsOverlay.ongeometrychangelets us know when the size or visibility changes.
Let’s use this to be aware of the size of the title bar area and move the header down if it’s too narrow.
if (navigator.windowControlsOverlay) {
navigator.windowControlsOverlay.addEventListener('geometrychange', () => {
const { width } = navigator.windowControlsOverlay.getBoundingClientRect();
document.body.classList.toggle('narrow', width < 250);
});
}In the example above, we set the narrow class on the body of the app if the title bar area is narrower than 250px. We could do something similar with a media query, but using the windowControlsOverlay API has two advantages for our use case:
- It’s only fired when the feature is supported and used; we don’t want to adapt the design otherwise.
- We get the size of the title bar area across operating systems, which is great because the size of the window controls is different on Mac and Windows. Using a media query wouldn’t make it possible for us to know exactly how much space remains.
.narrow header {
top: env(titlebar-area-height, 0);
left: 0;
width: 100%;
}Using the above CSS code, we can move our header down to stay clear of the window control buttons when the window is too narrow, and move the thumbnails down accordingly.
Thirty pixels of exciting design opportunities
Using the Window Controls Overlay feature, we were able to take our simple demo app and turn it into something that feels so much more integrated on desktop devices. Something that reaches out of the usual window constraints and provides a custom experience for its users.
In reality, this feature only gives us about 30 pixels of extra room and comes with challenges on how to deal with the window controls. And yet, this extra room and those challenges can be turned into exciting design opportunities.
More devices of all shapes and forms get invented all the time, and the web keeps on evolving to adapt to them. New features get added to the web platform to allow us, web authors, to integrate more and more deeply with those devices. From watches or foldable devices to desktop computers, we need to evolve our design approach for the web. Building for the web now lets us think outside the rectangular box.
So let’s embrace this. Let’s use the standard technologies already at our disposal, and experiment with new ideas to provide tailored experiences for all devices, all from a single codebase!
If you get a chance to try the Window Controls Overlay feature and have feedback about it, you can open issues on the spec’s repository. It’s still early in the development of this feature, and you can help make it even better. Or, you can take a look at the feature’s existing documentation, or this demo app and its source code.